


A Smile You'll Carry Through Your Days

by perfectlystill



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 10:10:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4387778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlystill/pseuds/perfectlystill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Izzie believes in karma. It always comes back.</i> Izzie after season 6.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Smile You'll Carry Through Your Days

**Author's Note:**

> In all honesty, I have never in my life watched beyond season three, and stopped my rewatch after 3.17.

There's a list in Izzie's mind, as small as it may be, of things she can't do anymore.

But there's still a ball of yarn with needles stuck through it next to her bed, and she has an old game of scrabble on the top shelf of her closet, the cardboard box worn and breaking. On particularly lonely nights -- because she is lonely now, lonely in a way she never was before -- she rubs at a smooth piece between her fingers. The world's tiniest violin. 

Izzie has never been very good at following rules, even ones she sets for herself. 

 

 

She misses Alex.

She misses the way he'd kiss her like it mattered, present and never habit. Habit has a nice ring to it, something that just becomes part of your routine, part of you, easy and steady and constant. Habit implies you won't ever stop. Izzie thinks maybe Alex always knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he'd stop kissing her. His mouth was warm, and over the time she knew him, had grown soft. 

She misses how she had loved him, so much, but not enough.

 

 

She works as a surgeon.

She lives in Alabama, and she still gets to save lives. It's less work, less trauma, less time. 

The pay is good. She has a nice two bedroom house she spends her free time decorating. Painting the walls blue and green and coral instead of retail beige. She puts up new curtains and re-tiles the bathroom herself with the help of a nice old man at Lowes. Izzie takes the vacation time she gets and visits Disney World. She feels lonely there, waiting in line to ride "It's a Small World" for the third time in a day. She pushes the feeling back until she's lying her in rented resort room, the air-conditioning making her shiver, and the phantom feeling of an unfamiliar place looming large. 

 

 

Izzie calls her mother twice a year, and her mother always asks if she's seeing anybody, and she always says no, and her mother always clucks her tongue. 

"You deserve to be happy, Cricket."

"I am," she says, rubbing at her temple. 

 

 

Regret and guilt are funny things. 

Izzie feels guilty about the end of her marriage, and she regrets leaving.

She once thought she was better than Alex, and that's probably the punchline to the funniest joke she's ever heard. If anyone deserves to be happy, Izzie thinks, it's him. 

She regrets cutting the LVAD wire, and she feels guilty about it, but she knows if Denny had lived, that if Denny was alive, she wouldn't.

That's an awful thing to know about herself. 

 

 

"Can I buy you a drink?" a man asks. His hair is graying at the temples and his eyes are crystal blue. 

"No." Izzie gives her best smile. 

"Oh, come on. Just five minutes."

Izzie swirls her straw around the melting ice in her glass. "No thanks."

 

 

She still likes to bake, and there are nights -- too often -- when she's up until 4 in the morning making blondies and muffins. 

Izzie likes the precision of baking, scooping up too much flour in her measuring cup and then pushing the excess off with the back of a knife, smooth and just right. She likes whisking melting chocolate around the bowl until her wrist aches. She does this too much sometimes, and it starts boiling, goes bad. 

She likes the way baking smells the same it did when she was a young, watching her mother putt around their cramped kitchen.

She brings her treats to the hospital and leaves them in the break room. She tries to bring them to the local food pantry once, but they can't accept her tray of cookies.

"No, I get it," she says, almost bashful. "I could've stuck razors in them."

 

 

Izzie's not drowning in self-loathing. 

She should feel worse, she thinks. She mourned the end of her marriage, and she misses Alex, but she sent the divorce papers without hesitation. She should feel more regret, and more guilt, and _more_ of everything. She thinks, maybe, she could be almost happy. She doesn't want to feel almost-happy. 

There is something toxic and fragile about her happiness. 

 

 

George would want her to be happy. 

Denny would want her to be happy. 

Alex, well, she wouldn't blame him if he didn't.

 

 

Izzie has never been able to shake her love of the holidays. 

She hangs up lights outside her house, stands on a latter to get them around the edges of her roof. She uses the multi-colored ones instead of the white, and impulse buys light-up reindeer and Santa in his sleigh for her lawn. It doesn't really snow in Alabama. It didn't really snow in Seattle, either, but there was more than she gets here, and Izzie finds she misses it. She decorates her tree listening to Christmas radio, and hangs up stockings she won't bother to fill. 

When she goes to Christmas Eve mass -- she is Catholic in name only, really -- she almost cries when everyone sings, loud and together. It's the overwhelming feeling of community that makes her smile small. She joins in, off-key and just as loud as the woman next to her: "Joy to the world."

 

She goes on a few dates with a nice man. Never married. 

"I could be the love of your life," he says. 

It's a joke, his eyes dancing and his mouth twisting up.

Izzie exhales, sets her silverware on either side of her plate, and looks at him slowly, searching. "No. You won't be."

"I was just--"

"You won't be," she repeats, quiet and firm. She's unblinking. "I had the love of my life, and he died. You won't be the love of my life."

She breaks up with him two weeks later.

 

 

The cancer comes back.

Izzie believes in karma. 

It always comes back.


End file.
